My Father died when I was six. I cannot think of any way less blunt to say it than this.
This is my closest attempt at writing a memoir. Like many other memoirs I’ve ever tried to write during the years that followed his departure and failed, I’m scared I might never get to finish writing this one because inconsistency and not knowing how to express grief in writing, maybe.
In Junior Secondary, I’d begun writing a novel- or what I thought was a novel- with the title “Twisted”. It was meant to be about my father - how he died, and my mother - how she struggled(?) to raise my siblings and I through school. Few of my friends, classmates read it and went, “tell me this is fiction!” And when I told them it wasn’t, as usual, I got the ‘poor- six- year- old-who- lost- his- father- in- a- robbery- attack’ reaction which I might have loathed so much. I’d initially not wanted anyone to read it.
I cherished this manuscript so much, it was pages of A4 papers with a yellow cardboard cover that I’d meticulously designed myself and stapled together. If you knew the luxury it was to carry around plain papers during my junior secondary, you’d understand why it was I cherished it. I carried this manuscript with me till Senior High and I still have it till date. But I never completed that story, sadly. My sister had chanced upon it several times, and she did read it over and over. As she did other of my many uncompleted stories. It was as though she was obligated to and I most of the times felt irritated whenever she asked why I’d never completed them.
Why I stopped writing that story is not something I can remember, but we could blame it on inconsistency and self-doubt as long as I do not remember.
Back to my father. I hate the fact that I do not know much about him asides few blurry memories and stories. Last year, during his death anniversary(feels really awkward saying this), I wrote him a poem because I’d failed at writing something close to a memoir about how living a decade, two years without a father figure was hard. And I could, perhaps in my mind, hear voices ask if twelve years wasn’t a gap so wide to have forgotten about the past and moved on? It wasn’t a rational thinking, was what I said to myself. If I should live a century longer, it won’t be time enough to mourn my father. Truth be told, the void widens as the years grow by. The memories might grow faint or disappear even, but the fact remains — I have lost half my essence to living.
My mother is a wonderful, strong woman. I could say, “God is a woman” and mean it sincerely because I do not need to look up to the heavens to pray to a God when the fire sparks in my mother’s eyes are powerful enough to consume a sacrifice on a mountain top. But I am not closely bonded to this woman as I am supposed to (I am doing my best to, believe me), and some part of her knows this. Sometimes she’d stare at my toes when we’re together and tell me that I have my father’s toes and curse nature that I did not take after his height. My father was tall, really tall.
Seeing him lie motionless in a coffin, he didn’t seem as tall as he used to. And that was what broke my heart first. I can remember the six year old boy I was, wondering quietly to himself in innocence and naivety, if morgue attendants cut the legs of really tall persons so they could fit into coffins. And he was bloated- my father was lanky in real life- and ugly. Death is Ugly. With all that bronze embalmment, I could hardly believe that was my father lying inside of a box. The gracefulness of Stephen shrunken into a white tux that was oversized, and fitted into a metal coffin. And the memories of him flashed through me in retrospect.
On a Thursday, I think — I am not certain which day it was — he’d bade us farewell and I can still make him out in my memory, though incompletely, carrying me on his shoulder on the verandah, he’d said to return to spend easter with us. Then he left.
He never returned. A T.V broadcast and a late night phone call was all it took to set loose Hell’s metal bars on my family that night.
In the manuscript that I’d been writing, I remember now that I’d written it to not appear to be my family. So I chose a Yoruba name for my father, named my mother Sade and chose Yoruba names for myself and my siblings. Maybe that was why I’d lost interest in writing that story — at this point, I cannot think of it as a memoir any longer, because it wasn’t written with vivid realness. It told things as it was meant to, but not with the right perspective and characters.
I do not remember that night clearly, but I do remember few of the burial arrangement procedures and my siblings writing tributes, to the day he was laid to mother earth. I remember the priest’s voice as he commended “Earth to Earth, Dust to Dust…”, my mother’s friend carrying me on her lap, my mother worn out from crying, fagged out, distressed. And my elder sister going to war amidst tears with the man(or lady) who wouldn’t position the microphone at a distance from her mouth as she read her tribute. I had wanted to jump into the grave, but it was more of an uncoordinated thought than it was an impulse.
My father rarely hung out with mates, as my mother said. But he was a good man by nature. Funny, witty and loving. He was a good husband and father. It was after he died that sympathizers trooped in to say how good and caring he was. He loved Lucky Dube, and Bob Marley, majorly for his Buffalo Soldier. And Abba’s “Chiquitita” was amongst his favorite music. And I did grow to love both artistes.
I have forgotten what aku tastes like since he died. On rainy nights, he’d go outside and hunt the flying insects. Drenched, he’d return and fried them with oil and shared it out to everyone. He never bothered to wash his oiled hands after eating them, he simply rubs them on his hair. And I am not sure I have ever washed my hands after eating something oily except my mother is present. If it is uncultured or unhygienic, it is an unhygienic nature I’d love to keep.
When he had no perfumes or deodorants, his bathing soaps served as one. And I never found this act amusing till I had to try it in boarding house but couldn’t.
It never occurred to me that I’d have to live without a father figure in my life till few weeks after his funeral in class, at school when someone insulted my father. I broke down in tears without saying a word to this classmate because from him I learnt to never fight someone for their stupidity.
I hated being around kids who talked about their father. And when we had to write essays about our fathers in class, I began to cry. But still wrote those essays. And I wrote them referring to him as someone who was still living not bothering if he really wasn’t.
In those numerous compositions about my father, I wrote his occupation as a Banker. It took coming of age, and knowledge I got from visiting banks and seeing men dressed in same uniforms as he did in photographs to really come to terms that he wasn’t really a banker, but a security officer at a bank. I do not say this to demean him or to make you think that my regards for him might have diminished. No. I say this because he was honorable in the occupation he had. And he never for once complained about anything regards his profession. Like many husbands, my father had dreams, which, sadly, he never got to accomplish. He was more knowledgeable than I ever had imagined, and I am glad that he did a wonderful job in leaving imprints and principles which I still walk in line with. He lived beyond what I’d expected of a father at age six. I hate that there might be days I need someone to share some things with and get advice or experience from, and he is not there. I wanted to blame him for leaving. I wanted to blame God for taking him.
There are many things I miss about him. I do not know why I mostly miss the half- filled- bottle-cork of 501 he generously shares with I and my siblings against my mother’s recommendations early on Saturday mornings.
My father was a good man, I cannot say this enough. Goodness is rare. So when you lose a rare asset, it is often impossible for them to be replaced. 13 years later and my mother still has an album of his old photos and his funeral program. On some days I sneak into her room to read the tributes in the book, even one in my name I cannot remember writing, then sing fading away like the stars.., and ugly cry myself to sleep on her bed.
Thirteen years is not enough to stop mourning someone. It’s not too long a time to forget and move on. Sometimes moving on is not easy, not an option. Sometimes there are scars which never heal. I think this is mine scar.
Last year, I saw “Coco” the movie, and imagined what if people who die here on earth have another life in the afterlife. And that the only thing to guarantee their existence in the afterlife is that someone, some relative on earth somewhere or even a friend, remembers them. Else, they’d cease to exist and vanish into oblivion.
If I am the only relative who remembers my father, and light candles in my heart during his anniversary, and every other days, it is enough to know that even in the afterlife, he blooms as a flower.
I am holding on to his photographs to remind me of his face in any case should memory fail me as it has made me to not be able to remember what his voice sounds like. Or his laughter.
So, if you ever think thirteen years is enough to mourn someone who means everything to you, you might need to think again. I’d give up anything to be able to see him again, even for a day.
All I have been trying to say in maybe a few thousand words, is that I miss my father. Greatly. Time is not all that capable of healing every wound. This is a wound I am cursed to reopen as many times as possible even before it heals.
This is me promising to never forget, to always remember, what it was like to experience a gem.
“Death’s effect isn’t an event that begins and ends. It persists. Death’s effect are always”
-Grief. October 18 2018
